


I Want to B(AU)elieve

by aesthetic_warning



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, Attempt at Humor, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Established Relationship, M/M, The X-Files References, no beta we die like half the love interests do
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesthetic_warning/pseuds/aesthetic_warning
Summary: “Unit Chief Emily Prentiss?” at her nod he continued, smiling brighter than she had ever seen in a room full of photos of dead people. “Hi, I’m Agent Luke Alvez and this is my partner, Dr. Spencer Reid. We’re with the X-Files Department. We’ll be taking over from here,”She stared at the two men for a few moments as she shook Alvez’s hand, searching their faces, looking for anything to indicate that what she was hearing was an elaborate but distasteful joke. When Emily found nothing, she stepped back and pulled her arm away as if his steady grip had burned her.“Bullshit,”
Relationships: Luke Alvez/Spencer Reid
Comments: 9
Kudos: 39





	I Want to B(AU)elieve

**Author's Note:**

> I started watching the x-files again recently and thought: "huh that would be fun to write"  
> reid and alvez aren't mulder and scully in the character dynamic sense, more of a "theyre just xfiles agents" type thing, but i did try to play in a bit to the classic "skeptic/believer"

Emily looked down at the victim in the grassy field, disposed of in a way that was very telling as to what the killer thought of her. She sighed. It was the 7th body in 2 weeks and the local police department was getting antsy. 

“The lack of care in this indicates the unsub saw her as less than human- he didn’t even bury her, just dropped her here,” Tara said, squatting down to take a closer look at the body. Everyone nodded, observing as much as they could before Forensics took away the body for an autopsy. “No ligature marks- whatever happened to her happened quick. Same MO as the others; no defensive wounds, needle-thin puncture wounds on both arms, legs, neck, down the back, and chest,” she observed, looking at the girl left on her side, propped up slightly against a fence post face down like she had been laying on her back and someone rolled her as far as she could go before running into the obstacle. 

Rossi sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Any notable COD or can we assume this one is the same as the others?”

The local medical examiner had been having just as much success in the luck department as they were. He had been less thorough than he’d like to admit on the first bodies, assuming they had just been junkies that overdosed on the side of the road. Of course, once he noticed a pattern in the cause of deaths in the victims, he informed the Chief of Police, who called the FBI. 

Each body displayed almost no symptoms of any foul play- all tox screens came back clear, no fatal wounds were found on the body, everything seemed normal, except for the fact that apparently every single victim had such a low white and red blood cell count that it could only be attributed to outside forces. 

Prentiss nodded and waved the forensics team over, allowing them to collect evidence and move the body after taking photos. On the outside she looked stoic, if not just slightly exhausted, but on the inside, her mind was reeling. “Rossi, Morgan, you go to the ME to see if there are any changes in what he finds. Lewis, I want you, JJ, and Simmons to look through missing persons records and see if anyone matches the current victimology. Ask Garcia if she can find any connections between the previous victims and this one as soon as we get a positive ID,” she ordered, by now well versed in the intricacies of being Unit Chief. 

As her agents split up to do what she ordered, she got in her SUV and thought back to every piece of evidence they had gathered so far, trying desperately to connect the dots. 

The unsub injected his victims with a completely untraceable concoction that both lowered white and red blood cell count, and also sped up blood production. Emily remembered the baffled expression on the ME’s face when he told her the body on his table was a week old by that point, but the blood inside had looked months old, due to early signs of blood cancer showing throughout the body. She had said it was the beginning of acute myeloid leukemia, cancer caused when a body doesn’t have enough healthy blood cells being produced. 

She and the rest of her team had reasoned that the only conclusion they could currently draw was that the unsub was making this poison himself, as none such existed in the world, and must have a higher education in the biochemistry field or some other adjacent type. The unsub injected his victims multiple times as well, all throughout the body, so they assumed his poison wasn’t strong enough to effectively kill with just one dose in a concentrated spot of the body. 

There was also the issue with their profile. It contradicted itself in more places than one. The unsub left the bodies of the victims in relatively public areas, no forensic countermeasures in place, but also developed a poison completely invisible on a tox screen. He disposed of the bodies like they were nothing more than a toy to play with and then throw away, but no harm was done to any of the bodies except the COD and injection wounds, implying a great deal of care was used. There was the lack of a struggle indicated on any of the bodies, but the MO not matching with the baiting and trapping type of killer, and none of the victims connected in any way to any person which eliminated a close friend or family member to the victims as the unsub. 

She was only a few minutes away from the police station when she got a call and connected it to her bluetooth, ready for the next report of bad news and no new evidence. 

“Prentiss,” she answered, pulling into the pothole covered road leading up to the station. Apparently the town had gone through some major budget reworking, as their main source of income was fishing in the large river that flowed through the whole county. Due to flooding, there were significantly less fish able to be caught, and nature conservation experts had told them to stop fishing all together and let them repopulate. Morgan’s voice came out through her car speakers. 

“Our bad luck has continued,” he said in lieu of a greeting, and she sighed, expecting the worst. “Apparently a few days ago, the ME realized every one of the victims bodies had been drained completely of bone marrow,”

She was silent for a moment, before finally, “They  _ what? _ They- he didn’t  _ tell us? _ ” she asked, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel. 

Morgan let out a bitter laugh. “No! Apparently he told the Police Chief, and when she made a phone call right after, he just  _ assumed  _ we were being told,” Prentiss let out a groan as she parked her car in the lot, pausing a moment after putting it in park to just drop her head into her hands and take some deep breaths. 

He kept talking right as she turned off the ignition, forgetting that her phone was connected to the car. “Yeah, apparently she called-“ the last thing she heard before the call ended. She grabbed her phone off the passenger seat, speed walking into the precinct while trying to scroll through her contacts to find Morgan. 

Prentiss muttered to herself as she walked to their designated conference room. “She called someone  _ else _ ? Who the fuck did she-“

Emily was stopped in her tracks by a hand sticking out in front of her. She looked up to see a man smiling politely at her, his right hand extended for her to shake it. Behind him stood a taller man wearing a sweater vest and chuck taylors. Her initial impression of the pair was already low. 

“Unit Chief Emily Prentiss?” at her nod he continued, smiling brighter than she had ever seen in a room full of photos of dead people. “Hi, I’m Agent Luke Alvez and this is my partner, Dr. Spencer Reid. We’re with the X-Files Department. We’ll be taking over from here,”

She stared at the two men for a few moments as she shook Alvez’s hand, searching their faces, looking for anything to indicate that what she was hearing was an elaborate but distasteful joke. When Emily found nothing, she stepped back and pulled her arm away as if his steady grip had burned her. 

“Bullshit,”

Dr. Reid laughed, his hair looking like it’d fit better in a documentary about ancient aliens than a murder investigation. ‘ _ But he’s apparently from the X-Files, so maybe I’m not that far off _ ,’ 

They both pulled out their badges in unnervingly synchronized movements, showing her, clear as day, their official FBI badges, labeling them as agents in the apparently very real and not fake X-Files department. She let out a sharp breath from her nose when she looked at them. 

After a few moments of shock after finding out the fake secret department of the FBI was in fact real and they were standing right in front of her, Emily gathered her bearings and looked Agent Alvez right in the eye. 

“Thank you for the offer, but we don’t need any help. You can go back to Quantico,” she dismissed them, her distrust of the two far outweighing her need for help in the case. 

Dr. Reid finally spoke up, and she noticed the boyish smile on his face didn’t quite match up with the way his eyes were flickering around the room, observing everything with a curious gleam. “Tell that to the Chief of Police,” he laughed. “She invited us here specifically,”

“She asked for us by name,” Alvez added, a joking undertone in his voice. 

“Pretty easy to do when we’re the only people in the department,”

“Still,” Alvez shrugged, a wide and genuine smile pointed at his partner. “It’s nice to be appreciated,”

At this, Emily finally broke, a broken laugh escaping her throat. “Appreciated? For  _ what _ ? Hunting aliens?” She knew she was letting her frustration and confusion affect her emotions, but god damnit did it feel good to just yell at somebody. 

Reid didn’t miss a beat. “Among other things,” 

She dropped into a seat at the table in the room, her wide eyes studying them with unmasked scrutiny. “We don’t  _ need  _ your help. We’re catching a serial killer, not a teenage mutant ninja turtle with a penchant for bone marrow. Whatever you think you can do will only get in the way, and put others in danger,” she told them, her tone firm and unwavering. 

Alvez turned to Reid, looking unimpressed and a bit disappointed. “She’s over here acting like we haven’t been doing this for 12 years and aren’t the most qualified people to help when  _ bone marrow  _ just  _ mysteriously  _ starts disappearing,” Reid nodded, his expression essentially ‘ _ what can you do? _ ’ 

“She’s probably got a lot of personal biases to work through,”

“Take this seriously! We are hunting a dangerous criminal, not sasquatch. Supernatural creatures don’t  _ exist- _ some of the most monstrous things on this planet are the humans inhabiting it,”

“Wow,”

“A little pretentious, but I’ll forgive that, given your whole… entire career,” 

“ _ Supernatural creatures don’t exist _ ?” Reid asked. “Tell that to Lizardman,”

Alvez gasped. “Oh my god I almost forgot about Lizardman!”

Prentiss’s eyes darted between the partners, observing the smiles painted on both their faces and the way they both kept looking around the room at all the info spread up on the walls, as if trying to catalogue all of it before they were forcibly removed. 

It clicked. 

“So how often does this tactic work?” Emily asked suddenly, receiving two curious, yet knowing smiles in return. 

“What do you mean? Tactic?”

“The obnoxious, overconfident, moronic annoying duo routine,” she said, the two making faux-hurt expressions at every insult she threw their way. “How many times have you been so annoying that they agreed to let you work just to stop listening to you, but acted so confident that they’d let you work without interruption?”

Reid smiled, a real, genuinely impressed smile. “They did say you were the best of the best, Agent Prentiss of the BAU,” he turned to look at a photo on the wall. “They’d have a difficult time kicking us out- we  _ are  _ FBI, but they can make the case so much harder on us if they don’t cooperate to the best of their ability, and we’ve found the most effective tactic for combating that is removing them from the equation almost entirely and separately building our own case off of the usually minimal information they have for us,”

“That’s not to say we’re not normally just as annoying,” Alvez said, turning to look at the geographic profile they had established. “There’s only the two of us in our department, isolated most of the day- we picked up each other’s bad habits by default,” he explained, picking up a marker and drawing a line from the location of the first victim to the second, and the second to the third, like some sort of fucked up connect the dots puzzle. “Spence, you seeing the pattern here?” he asked suddenly, clearly ignoring Emily in favor of ruining her map. 

She looked at the shape Alvez had drawn using the connected dots. It wasn’t a picture or a letter or anything, just a bunch of randomly intersecting lines. “There’s absolutely no pattern there, not even the pattern you see when an unsub is trying to make it seem like the dump sites were random,” The locations were everywhere- near the forest on the edge of town, in fields in the middle of nowhere, even on both sides of the river that runs straight through the center of the map. 

“Bingo,” Reid said, studying the map. “A predator then, animalistic, no conscious thought to where the bodies came from or where they’ll end up. Completely random in the way animals hunt- with no reason to leave the body anywhere but where it is, why even move it once it’s gotten the food out of it?”

Emily gaped at them. “You’re suggesting that the unsub is  _ eating  _ them? That’s absolutely ridiculous! Did you even  _ read  _ the case file?”

“Twice” Alvez said, capping the marker and putting it back exactly where he had found it. “And then Spencer corrected the typos,” 

“Your medical examiner needs to relearn the difference between his ‘ _ who’s’  _ and ‘ _ whose’ _ ,”

She shook her head, reeling at the realization that while the overconfidence and annoying behavior was just a front, they truly brought out the most obnoxious in each other. She could already tell they were deeply codependent, by the way Alvez’s eyes would flick to the man beside him every few minutes, or how Reid was always slightly angled towards his partner. Prentiss felt like screaming. 

“You said you were asked for by name?” she asked weakly, already mentally preparing herself for the next week she was going to have to spend with the pair. 

“Well, the ME noticed the complete lack of bone marrow in the bodies, and called the police chief to let her know. She decided having no bone marrow left in a body with no visible exit wound constituted as _weird._ She’d heard a rumor a few years back about a case we worked in Vengberg- she and the sheriff there go way back- and decided to test its legitimacy by trying it out for herself. So she contacted the FBI again, only this time, mentioned that something ‘weird and unexplainable’ was going on,” Alvez explained, his hands waving around as he spoke. 

“And we’re the experts at weird and unexplainable,” Reid added. 

“So here we are,” 

She was thankfully saved from having to respond when the door opened and Tara Lewis and Matt Simmons walked in, followed a few seconds after by JJ. 

Simmons started talking as soon as he saw her. “They got an ID on the body because one of the interns at the morgue recognized her,” 

Before Emily could even ask, Tara continued. “We already had Garcia look into it, and there was no surface-level connection between her and the other victims,”

“There won’t be, the victims are just the first convenient food source your…  _ unsub _ , saw,” Reid told them, packing up the few belongings he had placed around the room- probably deliberately, if the way the two seemed to have a plan in the case they got kicked out before they got enough evidence- while Lewis and Simmons looked at him with apprehension and confusion. 

At their hesitation Alvez smiled and brought out his badge again, and now that Emily wasn’t the one studying it she could watch the man’s face instead, and how the amusement in his eyes morphed to almost imperceptible annoyance when her agents looked at him like they couldn’t believe he was serious. 

“Luke Alvez of the X-Files, this is my partner, Dr. Spencer Reid, and we’re taking over your case,” he explained. Emily’s eyes widened.

“You’re actually taking over- I thought when you said that it was part of your tactic?”

“Oh it is,” Reid told her, standing next to the door, clearly ready to leave to annoy the next person standing in between him and his alien. “It was also just the truth. It’s taken you guys a week to get where you are right now and 4 more bodies have been found. The Police Chief- Linda Barkwell? She decided to… explore other options,” he told her, walking out the door as Emily gaped at him, Alvez following behind without hesitation. Simmons and Lewis looked at her with a mix of sympathy and confusion. The door hadn’t closed, so she could hear the two asking an officer how to get to the morgue from where they are. Prentiss watched through a window as they both got into a car that  _ clearly  _ wasn’t the standard FBI SUV and pulled out of the parking lot. 

“Wow,” Simmons said after a few moments of silence. “Those guys are weird,”

“I heard their office is in the basement,” Tara muttered. “They probably inhaled some weird mold and are still showing symptoms,”

Emily scoffed. “What airborne virus has side effects like  _ ‘being annoying’  _ and ‘ _ stealing other people’s cases’ _ and-”

“Emily,” Tara said softly, coming to stand in front of her. “I know it sucks, but we need all the help we can get with this case, and if they can provide any insight? We’ll take it,”

Prentiss nodded, her brows furrowing. “You’re right. Of course. This isn’t about pride, it’s about helping to save innocent lives. If we have to work with those dickwads then whatever, as long as they help,” Tara nodded and patted her shoulder as she walked towards Simmons. “God. I should warn Morgan and Rossi,”

***

David Rossi glanced down at his phone from where he was standing in the morgue waiting for the ME to arrive. It had been a good 20 minutes of leaning against the wall and chatting about nothing of importance with Morgan when he got the text from Prentiss. 

“ _ Just a fair warning: you’ve got company, _ ” He read out loud, smirking as Morgan laughed. “That’s ominous,”

“If  _ we _ weren’t the law enforcement, I’d assume she was warning us about someone on our tail,” Morgan joked, his knowledge of all sorts of different action movies coming to mind.

Rossi shrugged. “We’ve dealt with our fair share of corrupt cops- could be she’s warning us about that,” They looked at each other with a bit of nervous apprehension, not liking the sound of having to deal with another shitty thing happening on top of all of the other shitty things that have happened. 

They didn’t have to wait long before the beeping sound from the keycard lock mechanism was disabled, letting the door open and two men walk through, one making a beeline for Morgan and Rossi and the other shrugging on scrubs and an apron. 

“You’re not the ME,” Morgan said, moving forward to stop him, but Rossi held him back as the first man held out an FBI badge towards them. 

“No, but I’ll be taking over for the time being,” the doctor said as the other man introduced himself. 

“I’m Agent Alvez, this is my partner Dr. Reid, we’re-”

“ _ X-Files _ ?” Morgan asked incredulously as he read the badge. “This is a joke. That doesn’t exist- the FBI doesn’t have a secret alien investigation branch,” 

Alvez smiled. “Wonder what the hell I’ve been doing for the past 12 years then,”

Reid scoffed from where he was setting up his recording equipment- just a microphone clipped to a light for him to speak into. Morgan didn’t know much about high end autopsy technology, but assumed that what the man was doing was pretty outdated. “If we just investigated aliens, we’d have run out of work years ago,”

“That is true,” Alvez said, nodding in his partner’s direction. “It’s why we also hunt vampires-”

“For the last time! They  _ weren’t vampires _ !”

“I know what I saw cariño and those buck teeth were  _ hiding  _ something,”

“Yeah? Well you were also drugged when you saw them,”

“Not the whole time” Alvez replied almost petulantly. 

“Just the times when it counted,” 

Rossi and Morgan watched the verbal tennis match, observing the comfort and familiarity the two have that only comes from years of working with someone. They also noted the self confidence so blatant it could only be somewhat faked, but real enough for Rossi to accept the fact that these men believed entirely in what they were doing. 

Reid started cleaning the surgical tools and Morgan was brought back to the problem at hand. “You can’t just walk in here and-“ he was interrupted by a stack of papers being held up to his face, the topmost one a signed permission form from the local ME for a Dr. Spencer Reid to perform in his morgue and do anything he saw fit to further the investigation. 

“Why are you doing the autopsy?” Rossi asked, no hostility in his voice, just curiosity. “The ME could do it and you guys could focus on other things,”

“I didn’t get my medical degree just to let someone else do autopsies that I could,” 

“The local medical examiner- Dr. Spatner- is perfectly competent,” Morgan insisted, conveniently ignoring how the man had forgotten to tell them about the lack of bone marrow in all of the bodies. 

Reid continued cleaning his tools. “I don’t doubt that. The difference being that  _ I  _ am looking in this body to find something weird and unexplainable, while  _ you’re _ just looking for an explanation. The ME gave me permission, so if you could please move out of the way of the gloves, thank you,” Morgan stepped to the side without question. Reid slipped on the rubber gloves and walked over to the table, turning on the microphone. 

“Anything besides the bone marrow that was suspicious?” Alvez asked, leaning next to the other two on the wall as he watched his partner work. 

Rossi nodded, thinking back to everything he’s heard the ME talk about so far. “the COD was a lack of white and red blood cells and-”

“Early stages of acute myeloid leukemia, right,” Alvez finished, and Morgan had the sneaking suspicion the man already knew all of this. They continued to work details of the case, occasionally quieting when Reid went to make an observation into the microphone. They told him a few things they decided in their profile, and he told them different cases the X-Files was called to work that turned out to have completely normal explanations. 

Morgan found himself believing the man more about the supernatural cases they’ve had now that he’s told them about the ones that weren’t. Obviously a tactical decision on Alvez’s part- and a good one- strengthening his Ethos, because he was more willing to admit maybe there  _ are  _ some unexplainable things out there now that the man that’s apparently seen so many has confirmed that a good majority of them were because of-

“My god the drugs, inbreeding and a  _ lot of it _ , some weird mushrooms that made a lady see ghosts, cults galore, so many genetic anomalies that people were convinced were monsters-”

“Fake vampire teeth,” Reid interrupted, a cheeky smile on his face. 

“Fake vampire teeth on  _ real  _ vampires though!” 

“Sounds redundant. Because it’s not true. It was just a kid putting roofies on pizzas and exsanguinating tourists,” 

“And cows! Six of them. Why would someone need that much cow blood?” 

Reid laughed and shook his head, before placing the victim’s appendix on a scale to measure it. “And we circle back to my hematolagnia theory, and the sexual pleasure from seeing or drinking blood,” 

Rossi looked at the two with a mix of confusion and a bit of horror clear on his face. “What the hell have you two gone through?”

Alvez laughed for a moment but stopped when he noticed the look on his partner’s face. It was scrunched up and focused on whatever he had just noticed in the body. He turned to the BAU agents. “What’s your working theory on murder weapon and MO?”

Morgan looked at him, reluctant to tell him their thoughts out of both shame for what seemed preposterous, and a residual distrust for the men. “We thought the unsub might have been injecting a homemade toxin into the victim that increased blood cell production while also eating away at the bone marrow- causing the cancer because of the lack of blood cells to form,” 

Reid heard this and looked up and him with confusion clear on his face. “But the toxicology reports came back clean-”

“An  _ untraceable  _ concoction, is the current theory,” Rossi corrected, a sigh he let out telling the X-Files agents just what the two men thought of this work in progress. 

There was so much missing from that explanation that Alvez considered just telling them to scrap the idea entirely and start anew. “Got a motive?”

“No,”

He glanced over to Reid where the man was giving him a look that was indecipherable to others but made perfect sense to Alvez. His hands were wrist deep in the body’s rib cage and he clearly wanted to say something but didn’t want to voice anything to the BAU agents he didn’t yet trust. 

“Really? Aren't you guys supposed to be the best profilers in the business? It’s been a week and you guys don’t even have a motive? Have you even profiled anything that doesn’t contradict something else?” Alvez asked, a fire burning in his eyes. He didn’t look angry, or display any of the emotions usually present in a sudden verbal attack. 

The BAU agents turned to give each other a look, and decided at the same time that they didn’t need to be in the morgue until the autopsy had been completed, which would be a while yet. They started leaving, giving goodbyes that were  _ just  _ polite enough to be socially acceptable, and stepped outside of the room. The moment the doors closed and blocked out the sound from the room, Morgan turned to Rossi. 

“They’re so clearly hiding something,”

Rossi nodded, motioning for the other man to walk while he talked and followed him to the car. “Obviously. The only question being why?”

“Also,” Morgan added, an annoyed tone slipping into his voice. “We have to ask how they mastered being bearably obnoxious,” he muttered, and his teammate laughed. 

***

Simmons looked around the room at his teammates, Penelope on a call with them as they worked through their theories and the new information gathered that day. “So…” he started, gauging the reactions of everyone to see if it was really a good idea to start a conversation if his friends were all stressed beyond belief. He decided it was a risk he was willing to take for gossip. “What did we think of those X-Files dudes?”

Immediately, groans rang throughout the room. 

“Wait wait wait- X-Files? They’re  _ real _ ?” Penelope asked, the sound of her typing immediately coming through the speakers. “Holy shit. There’s the file right there, yeah, they’re on the case too- oh that’s weird,” she mumbled. 

“What?” Prentiss asked, hoping whatever she said was something she could use against the agents. 

“All of their reports are scanned into the system- it’s why I was never able to confirm whether or not the X-Files was real! Granted I never looked very hard but I  _ never  _ would have thought to look at physical reports. This isn’t the 20th century anymore, why is their technology so outdated?”

Tara considered this, and shrugged. “Well they said they work in a basement didn’t they? I doubt their department has the funding necessary for things like that. Their budget is already probably spread pretty thin for things like-”

“My god they don’t have a plane. Oh my. They travel all over the country and they have to  _ drive  _ everywhere,” Garcia said, looking at their files still. “Oh that’s so sad, poor them,”

“I don’t feel too bad,” Morgan said, leaning back in his chair with a shrug. “They were dicks to us- Alvez specifically. Reid was doing the autopsy,”

At that, Penelope spoke up. “On their applications it said Dr. Spencer Reid has doctorates in mathematics, chemistry and engineering…” she trailed off, clearly still looking into his personal file. The rest of the team didn’t know whether to be impressed at the amount of degrees he has or suspicious of him. “Oh. After a few years he got his medical degree from Johns Hopkins and… he did that in 2 years because he has an eidetic memory and an IQ of  _ 187,”  _

“What the hell,” Simmons said, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “Who  _ is  _ this kid?”

“It gets even better,” Penelope said, still typing away. “Because  _ Alvez  _ is a certified trained profiler. He could literally work at the BAU if he wanted. He’s ex-army and has a bachelors in History, Folklore and Religion, Ancient Mythology and- wow. Women’s Studies, what a guy,”

Prentiss leaned forward and turned to Morgan. “When you said they were dicks to you, did it seem like they were  _ purposely  _ antagonizing you?” 

Rossi nodded, tilting his head in thought. “Yeah, it was a pretty sudden change in tone- one minute they were joking around with each other about past cases and the next, Alvez was criticizing our skills as profilers,” she considered this with furrowed brows. 

“Did it seem like-”

“Like they were hiding something? Without a doubt,”

“Garcia,” Prentiss said suddenly. “Has Reid filed the autopsy report yet?”

“Actually,” Rossi interrupted. “Reid, he used the audio recording system available at the morgue, and when I was listening to some of the earlier reports by the old ME I found out they're uploaded live to the county database as they occur,”

Penelope typed a few things on her computer and gasped softly. “Yeah ok, I’m listening to them now, I’ll redirect the speakers- Chocolate Thunder- when did you leave them?”

“Around 50 minutes ago,”

“Ok… I’ll rewind to that… and… playing now,”

_ “Have you even profiled anything that doesn’t contradict something else? _ ” Alvez’s voice rang out throughout the room. The audio was silent for a moment or two, and then the team heard a sigh.  _ “They’re gone,” _

_ “Thanks, Luke,”  _ Reid said, his voice much softer than anything the agents had heard before.  _ “Come look at this,” _

The audio went silent, the team assuming it was the man walking over to the table. 

_ “See this hole?”  _

_ “Looks to be about the same diameter as the markings on the skin,”  _ Both of their tones were calmer and more serious than what Prentiss, Morgan and Rossi had become accustomed to. They wondered how many people those men have had to lie to, to become so good at it. 

_ “Exactly. But look- it’s not even remotely close to the same relative place as the mark on the skin,” _

_ “So the needle was angled differently after it pierced the skin?” _

_ “It pierced the inner arm of the skin, but the hole here is on the outer arm of the bone. Needles can’t do that, especially not ones designed to pierce through bone to draw out the marrow,” _

_ “So what are you thinking here? Put away your cynicism and tell me your most outlandish theories,”  _

_ “The inner skeptic in me agrees with Emily Prentiss,”  _

_ “But there’s a part of you that’s seen a man’s deformed conjoined twin detach from him and crawl around murdering people, so think outside the box here,” _

_ “We need to consider that by thinking outside the box we’re ignoring the solution that’s inside the box,”  _ Reid was clearly getting a bit agitated by now, the frustration of the job clearly wearing down on him. 

_ “Spencer,”  _ Alvez said softly, and for a few minutes the only sound heard was shuffling. Reid took a deep breath. 

_ “There are holes in the exact same place on each rib even though there’s only one puncture mark in the chest skin. That kind of flexibility and control is only found in things like muscles,” _

_ “Are you suggesting it’s a tongue?”  _ They could hear the smile on Alvez’s face. 

_ “I am  _ not  _ saying it’s a tongue, I’m saying the wound pattern cannot be made with a rigid, straight object. The holes in the ribs are all on the  _ underside  _ of them, it’s why the ME didn’t notice them,” _ The team all looked at each other in surprise and confusion, all of them reeling, trying to figure out how to apply this new knowledge to their theory at hand. 

_ “Ok. Roleplay. I’m the… uh…. unsub, I like that word,” _

_ “I know you do,” _

_ “I think it’s a funny word,” _

_ “It is,” _

_ “Ok Spence, I’m the unsub, there’s a girl. I want to eat her bone marrow. How do I make her compliant?” _

It’s silent for a moment. The sound of papers being flipped through at a rapid speed is heard. It stops suddenly and Reid starts talking.

_ “The ME found an increase of hormone levels in the first victim but didn’t think to check in any of the others- I’m beginning to regret saying he was competent earlier- an increase of Erythropoietin and endorphins- whatever the unsub first did to the victim made her calm and relaxed, and then spurred her red blood cell production,”  _ Prentiss rolled her eyes at the fact that the medical examiner hadn’t told them that tidbit of information. 

The two didn’t speak as they considered what that meant. 

_ “So you’re saying the unsub manages to increase hormone levels that make her calm and heightens blood cell count?” _

_ “Yeah- that actually might be why there’s evidence of blood cancer forming in all of them- that specific type of leukemia happens when there aren’t enough red blood cells and the ones that are there die and mutate,” _

_ “But it’s making the marrow produce more,” _

_ “But there  _ isn’t any marrow anymore _! The unsub removes the bone marrow but the body is still under the assumption that it should have a lot more red blood cells than it does,” _

_ “Can an increase of endorphins really make someone calm enough to get their bones sucked with needle tongues?” _

_ “No, not to that extent. There’s something else we’re missing,” _

Suddenly they hear a knock at the door. 

_ “Do you think it’s Morgan and Rossi again?” _

_ “Why would they knock?” _

The aforementioned agents looked at each other with confusion and a bit of fear, knowing neither of them went back to visit the X-Files agents. 

_ “Hey guys,”  _ Morgan’s voice played throughout the speakers. Everyone in the room turned to look at him. 

“I’ve been here the whole time, I never went back,”

_ “You have the autopsy done yet? We want any new information as soon as possible,”  _ They heard Morgan say from the lab. The actual man shrugged, very clearly baffled. 

_ “Not… quite yet,”  _ Reid said distractedly. Exactly what it was he was doing, none of them knew. 

_ “Where’s Rossi?”  _ Alvez asked.  _ “I know it’s bureau policy that the buddy system is enforced,”  _

_ “He was… indisposed,”  _ there was a loud thunk and then the audio cut out. 

Penelope then spoke up. “The recorder was never turned off so it’s just been silence broadcasted for the past 30 minutes,” 

“What the fuck did I just hear?” 

The team glanced around at each other, everyone wondering the exact same thing as Morgan. 

Rossi sighed. “I think you just heard evidence that Dr. Reid and Agent Alvez’s claims were much more legitimate than we originally assumed,”

“Baby Girl, can you pull up video feed from the time it happened?”

“Already tried, Sexy, and apparently the security cameras have been out for about 2 and a half weeks,”

Tara frowned at this. “The whole building’s?”

“Uh… no, just inside the lab,” 

Emily stood up and grabbed her coat, putting it on as she walked out the door. “I, for one, will not stand by and let these men-  _ however rude they might be _ \- have their bone marrow sucked out by that Morgan Imposter thing,” she said, shuddering at the end of the phrase as she thought about what she just heard. Without hesitation the whole team got up to follow. 

They piled into separate SUVs, all heading to the morgue to see if they could find any evidence about what happened, hoping desperately that those 30 minutes it took them to listen to the audio wasn’t going to be their demise. 

Morgan voiced the thought they all had. “What if they were faking it? There’s no video, we have no idea if any of that actually happened,” 

Prentiss shook her head. “You know those two don’t do anything without a reason- they were annoying earlier to make me see it as a ruse and feel enough pride that they slipped past my blindsides. They were dicks to you in the morgue because they wanted you to leave so they could talk about something in private,”

Morgan groaned. “Why can’t they just say things like normal people?”

Simmons laughed at that. “I’d imagine 12 years spent in the basement of Quantico degrades someone’s social finesse pretty quickly- they’d only interact with people on cases who either wouldn’t have the clearance to look at things they’re doing, or wouldn’t even believe them if they did. It makes sense that they had to develop a way to scare people off without risking their own access to resources- can’t exactly kick someone off a case for being somewhat annoying,” 

The car filled with quiet, timid laughter, everyone on edge after the strangeness of the attack. 

“Back to my point,” Prentiss said, flipping her blinker on to turn into the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office. “What would they gain from staging their own weird doppelgänger murder scene?” When she got no answer and the car with Rossi, JJ and Tara pulled up, she got out and started walking towards the building. 

Morgan was already on the phone when they got to the front doors. “Hey Baby Girl, there’s a keycard entry to the lab, if you could look into the logs to find out the last person to have opened it, that would be great,”

“Already on it…” she said, typing on her computer as the team walked through the darkened hallways of the building. The group approached the doors to the lab, Emily pulling out her guest card and swiping it to get in. “Ok the last person besides Prentiss just now was… Harold Spatner, the ME… no one else…” They all looked at each other in confusion. “Oh my god- he went in about 20 minutes after Morgan and Rossi left,”

“That fits the timeframe for whoever attacked Alvez and Reid. Whatever it was must have taken Spatner’s ID card. His body might be waiting to be found in a field in town,” Emily opened the doors and walked inside, Alvez, Reid, and the intruder nowhere to be found. Everyone was immediately alert to find any evidence of where the two had gone. Unsurprisingly, there was almost nothing to indicate they had been forcibly taken at all, the only sign being the apron and blood covered rubber gloves used in the autopsy dropped carelessly onto the floor. 

After a few minutes, Rossi looked up. “Do you guys smell that?”

“Formaldehyde? Yeah it’s pretty potent David,” 

“No, not that… it smells… fishy,”

JJ sighed. “The river is gigantic and cuts straight through town. There’s no way to pinpoint a specific spot along it that our unsub lives at, providing that your sense of smell is  _ that  _ on point,” 

“No, I smell it too, it’s by the door,” Morgan said, walking towards Rossi. 

Simmons considered what JJ said for a moment, and then shook his head. “What if we’re going at this wrong? Maybe we need to think more like X-Files agents than BAU agents,” 

“In what way?”

He laughed, and leaned against the wall. “We have to think outside the box. Take a few pieces of evidence and make a claim, then fit the rest of the evidence around it,”

Prentiss shook her head. “I don’t see what else we can do in this situation, so sure. How about we start with the fish smell, and… the needle tongue,” 

Her agents were quiet for a few moments as they thought about it. “Maybe it eats bacteria from the river surface like a sucker fish,” JJ said, sounding unsure about her connection. 

“No, no,” Rossi said, shaking his head. “The unsub went directly for the bone marrow in people and nothing else- didn’t try to eat a liver to see what it would taste like- that is it’s natural diet,”

At these words, Tara looked up suddenly. “Fish bones are small. If this thing actually has a tongue that small, it’s probably for getting the marrow out of them,”

Matt scoffed. “Fish bone is made of cartilage,”

“Not all of them. Some species of fish have bones in them- like tuna,” JJ said, well accustomed to fishing days with her dad and uncle. “The unsub could have been eating the marrow from bony fishes in the river,”

“Why’d it start eating people then?”

Prentiss gasped. “The flooding! Fish population has been decreasing because of a mix of flooding and overfishing- maybe the unsub ran out of food in the river and had to turn to other options,”

Rossi nodded, before pulling out his phone. “In that case, the unsub would probably live as close to the river as possible- Garcia,” he said once the phone dialed. “I want a list of all residents in town that have their mail delivered to houseboats,”

“On it, anything else?”

“Yeah- internet history of Harold Spatner the past 2 weeks, I wanna see what he’s been doing since the murders started. He’s probably innocent, but his withholding of information has begun to get suspicious,”

“I wouldn’t be so sure to say he’s innocent,” Garcia said suddenly. “He started listening in to Reid’s autopsy broadcast the moment it went up- and he’s also on the list of houseboat owners,”

“Hey Garcia,” Tara said suddenly. “Is the location of his houseboat far away from others, but still in a residential area?” 

“Uh… yep, he’s quite the loner,”

She nodded. “He wouldn’t want to be seen catching and eating his fish by his neighbors or by local fishermen,” she reasoned. 

“Wait,” Morgan said, jogging to catch up with the group as they rushed out of the building. “Spatner went from  _ Probable Victim  _ to  _ Suspect  _ in less than 20 minutes- are we sure that we’re doing it right? Like Simmons said, that wasn’t  _ our  _ logic, that was the logic that people use to prove aliens caused the plague,”

They stopped in front of their cars. Prentiss sighed. “It’s not a lot to go on, I know, so don’t think of it as us going to apprehend an unsub, think of it as us going to interview another witness- it’s trying to determine if this piece we found even belongs to the puzzle we’re building,”

Her team agreed and got into the vans, the need to hurry and save the other agents truly pressing. They rushed down the broken streets, hoping they wouldn’t be too late to save them. They didn’t turn on their sirens, the streets empty this late at night anyway, as they wanted to keep up the appearance of going to an interview- for the citizens or themselves, they didn’t know. 

After about 10 minutes of driving they made it to the river and pulled up to the right houseboat. 

***

“You know what, darling?”

“What Luke?”

“I’m beginning to suspect that this  _ isn’t  _ Agent Morgan,”

“Oh really?” Spencer asked, turning his head to the best of his ability to look at Luke where they were sprawled out on the floor of what felt like a boat, an older white man standing a few feet away tinkering with something they couldn’t see. They had been drugged with a low level paralytic, allowing their eyes and mouths to move, but their arms and legs felt like deadweights to muscles made of paper. “What gave you that idea?”

Luke scoffed. “Well for one thing, he doesn’t have his badge,” 

“I bet he has  _ a  _ badge,” Spencer muttered. 

“Whose, darling?”

He shrugged. Or attempted to shrug. Whatever a temporarily paralyzed person could call a shrug. “I dunno, maybe a certain Harold Spatner’s?” he said loudly so the unknown man could hear him. Luke gasped. 

“Please work me through how you came to that conclusion, cariño, you know I love your gorgeous brain,”

Spencer took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, trailing off as if he was going to give a long winded explanation about how he figured out who the unsub was. “His medical degree is hanging on the wall over there,”

Luke turned to look, then cursed softly under his breath. “Forgot my contacts in the hotel room,”

“ _ Boys! _ ” Harold said, the S dragging on into a hiss. At the noise, Spencer gasped. 

“Wait! Let me guess: SnakeMan!”

“Because of the hiss?”

“Yeah,”

“Consider: Bone Sucker,”

Spencer winced. “I don’t know love, sounds like a prostitute, but like, a goth one,” 

“I see where your mind went there- I get it- I was referring to the fact that he sucks the bone marrow out of peoples bones with his needle sharp tongue,”

“ _ Sssilence!”  _

“Ok man this is getting to become a bit too close to a bad movie trope,” 

“Yeah dude,” Luke said, smiling a bit. “I’m pretty sure Voldemort said like the  _ exact  _ same thing,”

The thing rushed forward, stopping only inches from Luke’s face. He got a full view of the creature’s full mouth of razor sharp teeth. “ _ If you do not ssshut up, I will eat you both!”  _ It said, it’s hands wrapped around Luke’s wrists. He noticed the webbing between the fingers, and he started making connections. 

_ “ _ Oh my god you won’t like me, my bones are so thin. Barely any marrow in these bad boys,” Spencer said, wiggling his limbs a bit as if to emphasize how little bone he had. 

“Ditto,” 

“Yeah, him too, we’re both skinny boned,”

Harold studied Luke closely.  _ “It really doesn’t look like you’ve got thin bonesss, _ ” He said accusingly, narrowing his eyes at the man. 

“Oh no man this is all muscle and fat and- hey I’ve never told anyone this before, so let’s keep this between us ok? I don’t even have bones. I was very tragically born without them,” 

Spatner’s eyes widened, looking touched that someone had shared something like that with him.  _ “I’ll keep your sssecret. Will your friend keep it too?” _

“ Oh he already knew,” Luke told him dismissively. 

“I’m his emergency contact, I’ve got to know,” Spencer said to the man like it was obvious. 

“We actually met at a boneless people therapy group,” 

“Yeah when I said thin bones? I meant paper thin. Practically 2 dimensional. They break at a strong gust of wind,” 

“Not very nutritious at all. You’d probably use more energy sucking the marrow out than you’d gain from eating it,” 

Suddenly the creature slammed it’s fist down, the crash silencing the two men. It growled, his voice louder than it had been before. “ _ What do you two take me for? Sssome kind of fool?” _

“Absolutely,” Spencer told him, emphasizing every syllable. It growled again. “You cannot deny that for a second you believed that Luke was born without bones,”

“To be fair, I’ve heard we can be very convincing liars,”

_ “I don’t- AH!”  _ it yelled, before crashing to the ground, unmoving. The two looked at it in confusion, wondering if the grand finale was going to be heart failure or something. Then they noticed the pool of green blood spreading underneath the body, and turned their heads to see Prentiss running towards them, the rest of her team in tow. 

“Are you guys ok?” she asked frantically, kneeling next to them while a few of her other agents with names Luke didn’t remember but Spencer certainly did kneeled down to inspect the body. 

“Well, ah- you’ve caught us at a bad time,” he said, wincing as some feeling returned to his hands and feet. His fingers twitched. 

She nodded. “Can you stand?”

“We wouldn’t have been trapped laying on the ground at the mercy of Bone Sucker here if we could get up at any time,” Spencer muttered, sighing as the life threatening creature at his feet was handcuffed. “When’s the ambulance arriving? I’d like to get off this boat as soon as possible and I’m pretty sure the only way we’re going to do that is on a stretcher,”

She winced. “It’s just us, we didn’t call anyone else,” 

Spencer stared at her blankly. 

Emily laughed nervously. “We got in the mindset of you guys when we tried to figure out where you were- apparently it’s pretty hard to get out of,”

Luke clicked his tongue. “Rude, but fair,”

Spencer shrugged. “Well you certainly have enough evidence to convict him without the creature fact even being brought up, what with the kidnapping, listening into my broadcasted autopsy report- or at least I  _ assume  _ that’s why he attacked us- the dozens of counts of withholding of evidence and damn near medical malpractice,”

She shook her head. “No jury would convict without a murder weapon, and his _ tongue _ won’t exactly fly”

Luke laughed as he was picked up by Morgan. “Do what we always do- make shit up!”

Matt came by next to pick Reid up off the ground. “Drop us off at our hotel please, the paralytic will wear off enough by the time we get there that we can pass it off as drunkenness and sleep it off,” he directed the man, who agreed when Prentiss nodded her approval. “Oh, Prentiss?” he said suddenly, and she turned to look at him. “I get the feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other! Bye for now!” he shouted as he was carried off, his arm swinging up and behind him in an attempt at a wave from where he was in Matt’s bridal carry. 

After a few moments of watching them be loaded into the car, she sighed and looked down at the green bloodstain on the wooden floor. “God I hope not,”

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus points to whoever can identify which X-Files episodes I referenced


End file.
